Christophe Albertus, head of Engineering Design at SOCOMEC, explains how battery energy storage and distributed resilience provide critical protection against the growing power outages and grid disruption in Europe.
The challenges of grid flexibility are widely known, but recent power outages from the UK and Canary Islands to mainland Spain and Portugal have kept the grid resilience issues in the spotlight.
The cause of these outages remains unknown, but the switching to fluctuating renewable energy sources creates new challenges regarding grid frequency and stability. Also, variations in renewable generation can result in increased risk of gradual frequency fluctuations or “frequency drift,” which can reduce power quality and damage electrical equipment.
The rapid electrification of the economy exposes industries to more grid instability, which increases the power of more resilient and reliable, especially for energy-intensive industrial and commercial consumers. Just as distributed computing has helped protect the digital economy from data center outages, power management, energy storage, and generational decentralization can similarly make our economy more resilient to power risk. Production and storage of more power on-site provides essential backup power for large energy consumers and reduces the demand for electrical grids.
Regenerative risks to grid stability
The prominent recent blackouts across the Iberian Peninsula have sparked new debate about the risks renewable energy could pose to grid stability. These concerns are rising as renewables account for 47% of net electricity generated in the EU and more than 50% of the UK’s electricity mix in 2024.
Research shows that rapid integration of renewable energy sources into the grid reduces the ability to control grid frequency and stability. This is because the renewable grid lacks the built-in resilience of “system inertia.” This is the combination of kinetic energy stored in many synchronously rotating power station turbines, which rotate and remain resistant to sudden frequency shifts. This buys time to fix the imbalance.
Many renewable energies cannot directly generate alternating current (AC) power and therefore are separated from the grid and cannot directly affect grid inertia. Weather-related variation in renewable energy can also generate “frequency drift” where frequencies deviate from the required tempo of the grid potentially affect power quality and electrical equipment. Additionally, the European grids are interconnected. In other words, disruption of the power supply could result in a wider domino effect across the continent.
At the same time, rapid electrification of the economy means that grid instability can have ripple effects across multiple sectors. This was exemplified when the recent outage in Spain caused widespread disruption across industrial and commercial facilities, from oil refineries and factories to grocery stores and hotels, wiping an estimated 1.6 billion euros from annual GDP.
Resilience of decentralization
Recent events focus on improving the resilience of the power grid to estimate the Eurolectric of the industry group, which estimates that Europe needs to invest 67 billion euros from now until 2050 to make the grid more stable. However, there has been less debate about how dispersed energy generation and storage can provide decentralized resilience to industrial and commercial users, reduce reliance on utilities, and provide an additional layer of protection for the economy.
There are many technical challenges to providing off-grid backup power supplies, such as avoiding overcharging the battery and controlling variable renewable energy output to maintain the voltage and frequency of the building as grid declines and flows. Buildings need to switch between various backup power sources, such as drawing from generators when solar or wind generators generate less power. Battery cycles need to be managed intelligently to maintain health and capacity and extend lifespan.
Some pioneering organizations are now turning to smart battery energy storage systems (BESS) and solar power sources that can provide off-grid power sources from biomass during outages. Intelligent power management systems can now run “planned islands,” intentionally disconnect from affected power networks, perform “black start,” and recover full power from onsite battery energy storage and power sources within 30 seconds of a power outage. These systems form microgrids that can operate completely independently of the main grid.
Advanced Energy Management Systems can automatically calculate and adjust the energy consumption, production, and storage of the entire building to balance supply and demand for a downtime grid off-grid. For example, you can “measure” or reduce the output of an on-site renewable or diesel generator, avoiding overcharging the battery or “load disassembly” practice, reducing power consumption to save power. The same smart control system allows the microgrid to seamlessly switch optimal power supplies at all times, such as controlling and connecting the diesel generator set when the solar system goes down at night.
The digital measurement tool can automatically synchronize voltage and frequency levels with those of the main grid, allowing buildings to seamlessly reconnect to the grid after a shutdown without voltage or frequency fluctuations. This also helps protect customers from frequency fluctuations emanating from the grid.
Not only does these systems increase resilience, they also help to close gaps in the electric grid infrastructure, accelerating energy transitions while the main grid is expanding. One EV charging operator combines an on-site solar PV with a battery energy storage system to provide fully off-grid power to 39 EV charging stations, create a secure local power source for electrical transport, and bring in ultra-fast EV chargers to locations with no network connections.
Towards the “edge electric” model
Just as the “edge computing” model of distributed data storage helped protect the digital economy from data outages, the “edge electricity” model based on local energy management, storage, and production can change economic resilience. Building owners can use advanced modeling to size and scale battery energy storage systems to fit their future energy needs and generation capabilities, providing safe and future power sources. You can also see a “resilience as a service” model that provides more flexible and affordable energy security for more flexible and affordable commercial and industrial facilities.
Beyond resilience, there are many commercial benefits to intelligently managing, storing and producing on-site power. Businesses can leverage smart island systems to take advantage of pricing schemes that will reward key industrial and commercial consumers to reduce peak power consumption and turn resilience into revenue. Store excess power on-site to enable “peak shaving” and strategically charge and discharge batteries to reduce peak consumption and reduce electrical costs.
The excess power can even return to the grid to provide important features from flexibility to frequency adjustment, creating a noble circle where the decentralized resilience of large consumers improves the stability and flexibility of the entire network. Some utilities stabilize grid frequencies, operate other auxiliary services such as voltage regulation, create potential revenue streams for commercial and industrial building owners, and pay BESS operators to assist the grid.
If the grid is tense, like from the extreme temperatures of summer, you can also pay for commercial buildings to sell power to the grid and provide stabilization. This means Bess Resiliency Solution can effectively pay for itself, providing both behind the scenes cost savings and commercial frontline services for utility companies.
Recent events in Europe highlight the need for future mitigation electrical grids for more volatile renewable energy landscapes. Ultimately, however, the transition to decentralized redispersed energy sources requires a parallel shift to decentralized resilience, making the electrical grid a single point of failure in the economy.
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